Performance in Gaming Applications
Unfortunately, contemporary games do not support multi-threading. Even though “virtual” multi-core technology, Hyper-Threading, appeared long time ago, game developers do not rush to split the calculations performed by the gaming engine into multiple threads. And it is not about the complexity of this task for gaming needs. It looks like the increase of the processors computational power is not that important for games, because it is the graphics card that bears the maximum workload in this sort of apps.
However, the arrival of the dual-core processors gives use some hope that very soon we will see game developers put more workload on the system CPU. It can result into a totally new generation of games with advanced artificial intelligence and realistic physics.
In the meanwhile it doesn’t make any sense to upgrade to a dual-core CPU in a gaming system. This is actually one of the reasons why AMD is not going to give up the development of their gaming processor family: Athlon 64 FX. These CPUs work at higher clock frequencies and feature only one computational core.